A city isn’t supposed to echo like an abandoned cathedral,
every footstep swallowed by sirens or the hiss of empty streets,
We learned the language of panic—blue gloves, shuttered windows,
masked faces passing by with eyes that never meet,
Shops boarded like teeth punched out of a grin,
playgrounds taped in yellow, swings moving only when the wind gets mean,
Every morning, the news drips a fresh tally—coffins stacked,
nurses’ hands split and raw, the world turned quarantine, green
Doctors in plastic armor fighting invisible tides,
their voices cracked behind fogged shields and exhausted prayers,
Grandparents vanish into hospital wards, never seen again
but as a frozen smile on a smudged phone held up to blank stares.
(Chorus)
Who started it? Who planned it? Who lied first—what’s it prove?
When you’re counting the dead by the truckload, what good is the truth?
Conspiracies swirl like ash in the air, every answer’s a wound reopened,
But when you’re the one left breathing, the blame don’t change what’s broken.
It’s not who unleashed it, or who played god with the data,
It’s the silence after the sirens that screams louder than a traitor.
You can dig for the reason till your fingers bleed into the floor—
But the dead don’t argue, and the living don’t laugh anymore.
Every home a bunker, every cough an accusation,
the air itself transformed into a threat,
The clock on the wall is stuck at “Maybe Tomorrow,”
and tomorrow comes with one less face at the table—shame, regret,
Children tracing handprints on glass,
longing for grandparents locked in care homes,
Families in driveways blinking back tears as hearses idle,
engines humming hymns for those who died alone,
Weddings postponed, funerals livestreamed to a row of black rectangles,
every loss pixelated, every goodbye a digital lie,
Even grief denied its rituals —
ashes in cardboard boxes mailed out to addresses too stunned to cry.
The grocery store shelves picked clean as bones after a storm,
neighbors lining up six feet apart,
Eyes darting over masks, paranoia bred in silence —
strangers side-eyeing each other like plague rats in a shopping cart,
Birthday cakes devoured over Zoom,
lovers separated by counties, borders, or pure fear,
Street musicians silenced, theaters shuttered,
only the moon left to play for itself—no applause, no cheer,
You learn to tell time by the number of ambulances screaming down boulevards no one dares to cross,
And in the thrum of ventilators, you measure how many promises,
plans, and dreams this plague has cost.
Doctors fell with the rest—heroes for a headline,
then left to ration masks, to triage hope,
While nurses scribbled last words for families too scared or too banned to visit,
begging fate for a rope,
Bodies loaded in freezer trucks—no flowers,
no hymns, just body bags zipped up on a side street,
School kids staring at screens, learning algebra and isolation in the same seat,
The virus didn’t care about borders,
or politics, or prayers shouted at a TV screen,
It crept through hallways, cribs, boardrooms,
refugee camps, it found every crack in the dream.
Somewhere a violinist played for empty balconies,
somewhere a mother slept in a hospital gown and never woke,
Each headline just a number, but every number a name —
this is how history becomes a cruel joke,
We made memes of the horror, banged pots on balconies,
then closed our curtains on neighbors lost,
The world shrank to the size of a window, and everyone counted the cost,
The ghosts linger in ventilators, in the dust on wedding rings,
in the missed graduations and unopened envelopes—
If you survived, you’re marked by absence;
if you lost, you’re stitched together by borrowed hopes.
Maybe there’s no lesson except the scars,
no silver lining, no “after” that’s the same,
We light candles on windowsills, mumble names to the dark,
and try not to look for someone to blame,
The pandemic didn’t end, it just faded into noise—another trauma on the shelf,
But some things we’ll never forget: the hush of city streets,
the sirens, the loneliness, the slow collapse of self,
And in the silence that follows every alarm,
every funeral, every shuttered door and muted song,
The living clutch what they can—memories, masks, regrets,
the knowledge that “normal” was always a lie all along.
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